Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess

I’ve been working up to writing this post for over a month, ever since Wendy responded to The Dangers of de-Mystification. I can’t address the whole thing in one post, so this will have to be a series. But by the end of this post, I hope to demonstrate a little better what the problems with appropriating myths might be.

What Wendy took issue with was not my dilemma, but the foundational concept underlying my dilemma: Are We Authentic? Her post is well written, and I suggest you read it, but there are two points that I want to respond to in particular: 1) that even if we’re not “authentic,” it’s okay to re-use other people’s stories

Are all of those mentioned above, and many more, examples of appropriation as the legends and myths travel with us to new places and times? Very possibly. But is it wrong, is it a sort of cheating? No. They all serve our very human need to explain ourselves, not just to ourselves, but to the universe, to our ancestors and descendants.¹

and 2) we very well may be more authentic than the source material we have available to us

I can’t agree that your ‘appropriation of Greek Goddesses isn’t authentic’. Oh yes, the records we have today come down to us mostly in male voices, from men who lived in a society that feared and hated women, but are we much different than that today? … I don’t believe the myths and characters from ancient Greece were born in a vacuum, but that they were revised, re-written and co-opted from earlier times, changed to appeal to the audience of the day. … So… a reinterpretation for today’s women and purpose is as authentic as the Greek myths were in their time.²

She is right, of course, that stories are constantly being reframed, and, indeed, that is how they continue to live and remain meaningful. And she is right that, “in reality, we cannot know what they thought,” and that our reframing may give voice to people we cannot hear in the textual sources. The problem comes, however, when you erase someone else’s voice to do that. And it’s really a problem, when that erasure reproduces oppression. And that’s exactly what is meant by appropriation; that’s why it’s not a neutral word. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I’m branching out a little today. Below I’ve linked to the hour and 20 minute movie “Sita Sings the Blues.” It’s the story of Sita (and Rama) as well as the contemporary story of the marriage of animator, Nina, all set to a collection of really amazing animation styles and Annette Hanshaw’s 1920 vocals.

From what I have previously read, this movie was pretty crippled by copyright stuff with the music and the lack of money available kept it from going big. So contribute if you like it!

http://www.thirteen.org/sites/reel13/blog/watch-sita-sings-the-blues-online/347/

ETA: And here’s a link to an awesome post called Sita Pays Her Dues by bossymarmalade. It critiques the film and the appropriation of Indian stuff.

I know, I know … a real post is coming soon. But in the meantime, this is a really awesome article:

The Glory That Was Greece From a Female Perspective

Persephone Again

Everyone wants to talk
about Persephone.
Especially the poets.
How she was grabbed
and carried off,
how she was kept in darkness
so many months,
while her mother searched everywhere,
waited for her darling
to come home.

Some say
the daughter
liked what had happened
(you know the story,
how women really want it
even when they say no),
others claim it is in fact
the mother who is at fault,
that it is she
who drove her daughter
away, forced her to
leave home and
flee into that hidden world,
because of her own impossible
demands.

And then of course
there are those
who read it as a simple
nature myth–six months
of fertility and sun,
six of winter and death
over the land.

What do I think?
I think she is the soul
of each of us,
going down to obscurity,
resurrecting like a flower
over and over
as the seasons return.

Dorothy Walters

December 10, 2008

This is reposted with permission from the poet from her blog: www.kundalinisplendor.blogspot.com

Hi. This is not the Monster Syncroblog post promised. Nope. In my imagination, I will get it done. Obviously, I have already missed the deadline. However, I have another deadline. Actually, 5 deadlines. All for major real world projects. I will spend every waking moment working on these projects until December 12. Then I will return here and start up with some more good stuff, especially some monsters and some feminist interpretations of myths.

In the meantime, go read some of the awesome people on my blogroll. Mahud put up his post for the syncroblog, for example (and links to the other responsible people). And J. Harker, my old pal, wrote a neato review of a book.

What else … oh! Does anyone want to buy me Kirk Ormand’s Controlling Desires for Thesmophoria? It has actually been published (earlier than expected!) but is slightly outside of my price range (which ranges all the way up to about $3.39). An equally awesome present would be to convince the University of Arizona to buy it so that I can borrow it.

INFP - The Idealists

The meaning-seeking and unconventional type. They are especially attuned to making sure their beliefs and actions are congruent. They often develop a passion for the arts or unusal forms of self-expression.

They enjoy work that are aligned to their deeply feelt values and tend to strongly dislike the more practical and mundande forms of tasks. They can enjoy working alone for long periods of time and are happiest when they can immerse themselves in personally meaningful projects.

Okay blogpeeps, do you think that’s accurate? And also: go see what you get over at the Typealyzer.

I’ve mentioned Byblis before, I think. The poor girl fell in love with her brother which eventually led to being turned into a spring. But how she got from point A to point B is the awesomeness of the myth. And, because he is possibly the coolest guy on the planet, J. Harker over at Tales of a Wayward Classicist did a fantastic translation/adaptation of her myth from the Metamorphoses.

Here’s a selection:

It steadily got worse. She’d dream about him.
Really dream about him, you know?
The kind of dreams she’d ache to go back to sleep for.
She hated when he called her sister.
Something wasn’t right. She knew it, but couldn’t say it. Wouldn’t.

…

We have to tell him. Can you? Can you talk to him?
I’m afraid. I don’t know what’ll happen if I open my mouth.
We’ll write him a letter.

Oh the awesomeness … Go read the whole thing.

This is a repost from Mahud’s Between Old and New Moons.

The Topic for the Mythology Synchroblog is Mythical Monsters and Otherworldly Entities.

The Mythology Synchroblog is open to anyone who has an interest in mythology and/or Paganism. So, Pagans, if you wish to draw upon your own experiences if you have ever encountered such beings, that fine. Personally, I’ll be coming from a purely mythological stand point.

It would be a great help if would leave a comment, letting us know you would like to participate. Thanks!

Deadline 1st December

Please post your contributions on the 1st December and include a list of everyone’s posts somewhere in your entry.

Previous Mythology Synchrobloggers

• Dream Builders
• Quaker Pagan Reflections
• Executive Pagan
• Mythphile
• Aquila ka Hecate
• Symbolic Meanings
• ReligionThink
• Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism
• When Isis Rises
• Pitch313
• FULL CIRCLE CENTRAL
• Druid’s Apprentice
• Between Old and New Moons
  
• the dance of the elements
• Manzanita, Redwoods and Laurel
• Druid Journal
• Goddess in a Teapot
• Politics and Polytheism
• Hawk’s Cry: The voice of a witch
• Pagan Dad
• Gorgon Resurfaces
• Bubo’s Blog
• Many Questions

–

My previous synchroblog posts are:

Otherworlds Synchroblog: Olympus

The Dual, Part Duo

The Dual

Motherhood, the Sychroblog

Ge, Gaia, Gaie: Earth

I’ve been tagged. It’s a meme that I got from Stregheria Pratica (an awesome witchcraft and spirituality blog that stretches my knowledge of romance languages to read without Babelfish’s help). Here’s how to play:

1. Link you the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six Random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and them link you.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave comment on to their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Random things are as follows:

I have a cat named Nikos. It’s a common enough name, but I decided to name him that after Athena Nike, except he’s a boy, so I masculinized it (is that even a word?).

When I started this website at 13, I chose the name “Ailia” because I thought it was prettier than “Stheno” (my original pseudonym choice). I later realized how close it is to Dune’s St. Alia of the Knife, but I wasn’t awesome enough to know that at the time.

For the first time in my life, I live in a place with such a black sky and so many stars that I can identify constellations other than Orion and the Big Dipper.

I really like painting and knitting even though I haven’t done either for a long time.

I have always secretly wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons.

When I was a little girl, I dressed up like Sybil Ludington on the anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment and marched around my neighborhood with some friends and my mother (dressed as Susan B. Anthony) carrying signs exhorting everyone to give us women the right to vote.

And now, I tag Lord Alford, J. Harker,  Mahud, Aquila ka Hecate, Sarah, and A. Venefica to get random. If you don’t want to play, I totally understand, but I’m trying to build community here people!

I was playing on Gender Analyzer and discovered that I am a man.

I’m actually not (although I’ve gotten emails from wingnuts telling me I can’t possibly be a woman), but I am extremely curious what the heck it is that makes me sound manly.

I’m taking a class in sociolinguistics now, and really enjoying it. This program would be an interesting thing to write a paper on (not mine though). But I think it would be fascinating to find out what’s involved? And what would such a study have looked like in ancient Greece?

Sadly, I doubt there are enough extant texts to make such a call, but wouldn’t it be interesting to know?

Because the Wayward Classicist did it:

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next few sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the closest.

“So if the three goddesses took the apple immediately to Paris on Mount Ida to have him judge which was the fairest, at least 18 years had to pass before Achilles arrived in Troy. In any event, the judgment of Paris, Priam and Hecuba’s supposedly dead son, was swayed by the awesome force of love when, over bribes of power and wisdom, he chose the love of the most beautiful woman in the world - Helen of Sparta.”

- from Robert Bell’s Women of Classical Mythology in the section on Aphrodite

Here’s whatcha need to know:

• The Underworld is where people’s souls go when they die. All people, good and bad. It is, unsurprisingly, located under the world we inhabit
• It is not Hell and people aren’t generally punished (with a few exceptions)
• It is shady and dark and covered in boring flowers called Asphodel except for the Elysian Fields which are bright and sunny, but only really special people get to go there (like Achilles and Helen)
• It is ruled by Hades, and is sometimes confusing referred to simply with his name (or more often the genitive form of his name in ancient Greek) and he has a big scary three-headed dog
• It’s also ruled by Persephone, who got stuck there by eating a pomegranate, but neither she nor Hades judges you, they have three other guys for that.
• Once you die you get coins put in your mouth to pay the Ferryman who’ll take you to the Underworld; he will not take you back.
• Once you get there, if you’re normal, you drink the Kool-Aid the River Lethe and forget your life, which may be a blessing; also you may get back some memory if someone (like Odysseus) digs a trench and gives you some blood
• Going there and getting out is a good way to know you’re a hero

This is a little different if you’re into Orphism in which case the Underworld is just a place to go and get reincarnated until you’ve wiped sin from your soul (the sin of the Titans, from whose ashes humans are born in the Orphic tradition, eating the murdered Dionysus).

It is a fascinating place and the center of lots of chthonic power, but you alread know about that from reading Dark Earthy Death Goddesses and How To Pronounce “chthonic”.

[EDIT] Check out an awesome post about the mythic descent to the Underworld and its gender ramifications over at Gorgon Resurfaces.

Gut reaction, without thinking about it too much: Which are better, multi-generational households or nuclear familes? Why?

A big controversy in scholarship on the Roman family (and history of the family in general) is whether multi-generational households or nuclear families were the norm. At stake, as so often, is not simply accurate reconstruction of historical reality, but coded policy prescriptions for the present. Scholars from the left and the right have been curiously united in arguing that a) in the pre-modern/pre-industrial period, multi-generational households were standard, and b) that was way better than the situation we have now. Those on the left see multi-gen. units as a healthier, more supportive way to live; Marxists in particular regard the nuclear family as an artifact of the rise of industrialism, which separated the locus of production (the workplace) from the locus of reproduction (the home), with all sorts of negative consequences. Meanwhile, right-wing historians envisage a golden age of multi-generational families headed by a strong patriarch, in which a strong division of gender roles was maintained, children respected and obeyed their elders, and everyone was generally less individualistic, materialistic, and selfish than they are now. Also, they had less (of the bad kind of) sex. (Apparently this image of the Roman family provided crucial support for the family policies of Mussolini’s Italy.)

If you spend a while reading this stuff, you can start to wonder what anyone ever saw in the nuclear family. I put the same question to my students, and got an interesting range of responses, from the woman who had grown up in a multi-generational household and loved it (more support for everybody), to the one who came from a large nuclear family and so didn’t feel the need for any more people in the house (this is a Catholic school, after all), to those who thought that adding grandparents to their homes would create intolerable authority conflicts. We all thought it could be nice to have the extended family close enough to rally around in times of crisis, but we had different estimates of how close was too close — much like y’all.

P.S. Current consensus, again in case you were wondering, is that nuclear families have been the norm in most times and places, in large part due to simple demographic reality. In ancient Rome, roughly 2/3 of adults would have lost their fathers by age 25; it was difficult enough to keep two generations alive at once, much less three. Of course, there’s more to it than that — isn’t there always? — but this post is probably long and boring enough already.

*To give proper credit where it’s due, I should note that most of this is drawn from Suzanne Dixon’s The Roman Family. Full treatment of the demographic data is in Richard Saller’s Patriarchy, Property, and Death in the Roman Family.

—

This is a guest post by my undergrad Roman Religions professor, Adfamiliares, and she is - as you have obviously noticed by now - the bomb diggity. She has her own blog type thing at adfamiliares.livejournal.com, too!

Mahud, famous for his mythblog community organizing through the synchroblogs and also his awesome mythy pagan posts, has honored me by nominating this blog for the I Love Your Blog award. Now I get to pass the love on by nominating seven other blogs!

Between Old and New Moons - I love what you do with mythology and faith. There are plenty of blogs doing one or the other, but few that wed the two as effectively and appealingly as you do. Also, beyond my appreciation for the content of your posts, I think of you as a blog community leader, and that makes me just about adore you.

Letter from Hardscrabble Creek - I thoroughly enjoy your blog. You don’t do a whole lot of educational myth stuff, but your incorporation of ancient Greek religion not just into your personal perspective but a social one (what the pagan community is doing with it) makes your blog really stand out. Also, it’s beautiful. Fantastic pictures, and your narrative is great.

Tales of a Wayward Classicist - My old friend. It’s not just for that I’ve included you in this list, although I might not know of your blog were it not for that. You are hilarious. Your translations are good. Your discussion of the subject matter and the people (like Catullus and Lesbia) are totally on point and so fresh that it’s hard to believe we’re talking about things that were written thousands of years ago. You’re going to be a fantastic Classics professor.

Under Odysseus - is on hiatus. That’s a crying shame because it’s the coolest thing in the blogosphere as far as I’m concerned. But maybe if you go buy a “I sacked Troy and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” shirt, he’ll have enough money to come back! It’s a blog written by Euryochus, one of the sailors with Odysseus. It’s awesome. It makes me happy.

Bubo’s Blog - You do something that is particularly interesting to me. You relate Classical myth to kids in the classroom. It’s a topic that I think should be discussed more, but you not only discuss it you make it fun for people who aren’t in the classroom any more. Easy to read and all that, too, of course and fun!

Susie Bright’s Blog - What did you think I was just gonna talk about Greek stuff? No way! This is, without doubt, one of the blogs I love. She talks about herself, and politics, and other good stuff, but I like it best when she talks about gender and sex. Which she does often, and with delicious genius.

Xark - The tagline is that there are no unrelated topics, and that is pretty true. It’s a group blog and includes a bunch of “real” journalists (working for real newspapers!) which helps explain why it’s so well written and researched. It’s my favorite catch-all blog, no news-aggregators for me!

In closing, you all rock.

I’m writing here about what I cared about when I was younger: the Otherworlds of Olympus and Underworld. Most are aware of their existence, but few have any detail, and fewer still can really imagine Olympus, thus my focus today. Part of me would really like to post instead about the world of the Othered silent ancient Greek women, children, and low-status people who never seemed to make more than a cameo in any serious story, but as that is more mundane than the intent I read in Mahud’s invitation, I will save the inspiration for another post.

When Aphrodite was ushered to Olympus by the Horai, what did she see? I always imagined a house on a mountain, like the rich folks in California or Cuzco’s summer palace in The Emperor’s New Groove, but apparently the ancient Greeks didn’t catch that movie. For them the world was a disc with the vault of heaven (including the paths of the sun and moon) above it and Olympus, truly in the Heavens, above that. So, Mt. Olympus both signified the mountain and the sky, and both were the home of the Gods at once. To quote Harris and Platzner, “For many Greeks, the gods’ ultimate home was Mount Olympus; like the ziggurat, Olympus served as an earthly pedestal to which divine beings could descend.”

Yes, yes, but what did it look like?  Well, for one thing, it was sunny. Homer (Il. 749) tells us there was never wind or rain (I TOLD you it sounded like Southern California), but instead of one big palace, each god got dibs on a peak or ravine, with Zeus, of course, in the penthouse at the highest point, and that’s where all the gods met up. They all had thrones and presumably something to house them. Remember, too, that the Horai had to open the clouds to allow people to enter, that’s because the clouds functioned as a form of Gate. Everything else about the place seems to be lost to the ages or left to the individual imagination.

I wanted to write up something about the Underworld, too, since it seems to titillate people’s imagination more, but this is the second week of classes and I’m overwhelmed right now. If you ARE really interested in getting a similar post on the Underworld, let me know. It would probably be much longer, though, since there are many more extant sources.

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Other participants in this synchroblog include:

1. Faith and the Hero’s Journey (Hawk’s Cry: The voice of a witch)
2. Journeying to Otherworlds: Access Denied (Between Old and New Moons)
3. Lions at the Door (Quaker Pagan Reflections)
4. More Than These Words (Aquila ka Hecate)
5. Journeying to Otherworlds (The Dance of the Elements)
6. Mythology Synchroblog 4: Children’s Story for Mabo (Pagan Dad)
7. Underground Ruminations (Gorgon Resurfaces)
8. Synchroblog: Journeys to the Otherworld (Bubo’s Blog)
9. Symbolic Saiho-ji and Otherworld Journeying (Symbolic Meanings)
10. Becoming pagan in America - an otherworld journey (Executive Pagan)

Yep, it’s that time again. Mahud of Between Old and New Moons has declared that this month’s synchroblog (due Sep. 1) will be about Journeying To Otherworld. He’s got a nice list of invites, but if you’re interested, comment here or on his blog so we all know to include you in the eventual list!

I still have no idea what the heck I’m gonna write about, but what’s the point if you don’t wait till the last minute anyway.

df at Breakfast With Pandora just wrote a fantastic post. I am jealous. I wish I’d written it. Starting off discussing Nausicaa, he soon moves into the power of stories (remembered myths) in shaping our lives and particularly the question of our cultures’ approaches to children’s independance. One line I particularly wish I’d written:

I believe in the power of retelling this type of experience. I believe that we build ourselves up by building up our own history, our worthwhile narratives, the myths, the traditional “good stories” of our lives. I believe that when we suppress the events of our lives and do not recount them, parts of us are destroyed, never to return.

You can always tell a healthy family, for example, by the amount of stories it tells on itself.

I could not agree more.

This post is what I like best about when people write about myth. I’d do more of it myself if it weren’t so hard to do it well. It is a big part of why I studied Classics in the first place. A good academic example of such writing is, for example Somewhere I Have Never Traveled: A Hero’s Journey, by Classics prof. Thomas Van Nortwick.  It’s not so much about current events or culture as how “The ancient hero’s quest for glory offers metaphors for our own struggles to reach personal integrity and wholeness.”

Carol P. Christ, author of (most recently) She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World and (most famously) Womanspirit Rising, has been blogging over at Women and Spirituality for some time now and I think she’s great. Over the past month or so she’s written a series of posts (1, 2, and 3 with promises of more) on the dismissal of the Goddesses of prehistory that I think ought to be extremely relevant to those who makes their way to Paleothea.com. Although her posts inspired this one, I’m not going to attempt to summarize her; I strongly recommend reading at least one of her entries yourself (those who took part in the Dualism synchroblog might be particularly interested in the second part).

It makes a great deal of sense to me personally that separating one’s worship from oneself physically - either by worshiping an utterly non-corporal deity, or locating the deity far from one’s experience of the world (e.g. in Heaven), or theologically denying physical experience (such as death) - might put the feminine divine at a disadvantage. As a woman, I root a number of my conceptions of my own gender in my body’s (hypothetical) ability to produce life. I am extremely aware that this has been a crucial definition for my foremothers. Thus it seems “only natural” that feminine deities - particularly the Great Ones - should include as a crucial element of their identity the creation (and potentially destruction) of physical life.

However, I cannot escape nagging doubts on a couple of points: 1) menstruating and having a uterus are cool and all, but they are not all that is required to give life any more than sperm is (as those ancient Greek doctors I mentioned last week seemed to suggest), 2) the relegation to the principal role of Mother and only secondarily anything else (if at all) feels like something feminists should be rejecting, and 3) different cultures have vastly different ways of connecting things like birth, death, and eternity with their spirituality. The final point is the most important. Although it is obvious to me (again, personally, feel free to see things differently) that conceptions of the divine in religions such as most branches of Christianity reject both the Feminine and the Physical as one, that does not mean that embracing one (such as having a Great Goddess) inherently requires the celebration of the other (the physical body, birth, etc.).

Ironically, my last entry was all about how the two concepts are inextricably caught up in each other in ancient Greek mythology, particularly for women and goddesses. But here I want to take a step back and think about what a Great Goddess, or simply a non-patriarchal goddess, might have looked like or felt like to the women and men who worshiped her.  And though I am pretty convinced that some experience of Athena was as I described it in the last post, I am equally sure that there were others who experienced her utterly differently.

This was a tough post for me to write and I’m afraid I finish with more questions than answers. I am interested in any thoughts anyone else might have on this or a related topic and hope I’ll get a couple of comments on this one.

Carla over at The English Teacher’s Blog posted an entry about some dude’s presentation that I thought might be pretty interesting to the people who are interested in how Greek myths stay relevant to public education. The three main points of his presentation, she reports, are:

1. The future is unpredictable.
2. Students are networked.
3. The new information landscape is flat, less authority (teacher)-driven.

She goes on to discuss how some students are more networked than others, but in the sub/urban schools I’ve worked in, they managed to stay networked even without a computer at home.

I’m perverse, so let’s cover these points backwards, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Reposting a bit from On the Road in Virginia: Looking for Gleb Botkin over at A Letter from Hardscrabble Creek.

Gleb Botkin’s Church of Aphrodite lasted from the 1930s to 1969. (He formally incorporated it in 1939, but I don’t know just when it started.)

The church was more Goddess-monotheistic than polytheistic:

Aphrodite, the flower-faced, the sweetly smiling, the laughter-loving Goddess of Love and Beauty, is the self-existent, eternal and Only Supreme Deity, Creator and Mother of the cosmos, the Universal Cause, the Universal Mind, the Source of all life and all positive and creative forces of nature, the Fountainhead of all happiness and joy.

Did I mention this was in Virginia of all friggin’ places? Awesome possum. Go read the whole thing and look at pix and whatnot. Go Aphrodite!